Table of Contents

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Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS): Boston Study of Management Processes, 1995-1997 (ICPSR 3596)

Principal Investigator(s):Lachman, Margie E., Brandeis University

Summary:

This survey of adult management tasks was part of a larger
national project to investigate the patterns, predictors, and
consequences of midlife development in the areas of physical health,
psychological well-being, and social responsibility. Conducted in
Boston, the survey was designed to examine how adults manage tasks in
three domains of life -- work, family, and health. Further goals were
to describe the subjective experience of goal attainment in midlife
and to link it with objective... (more info)

This survey of adult management tasks was part of a larger
national project to investigate the patterns, predictors, and
consequences of midlife development in the areas of physical health,
psychological well-being, and social responsibility. Conducted in
Boston, the survey was designed to examine how adults manage tasks in
three domains of life -- work, family, and health. Further goals were
to describe the subjective experience of goal attainment in midlife
and to link it with objective measures of short-term longitudinal
changes and cognitive functioning. During the national study, the
Boston area was intentionally oversampled in order to create a subset
to be used for in-depth study of management processes in midlife. The
Boston study began six months after the national study, and consisted
of three interviews: a 30-minute phone interview followed by a
20-minute mail questionnaire (Time 1), a 90-minute in-person
combination of cognitive tests, cortisol testing, photograph taking,
and interview (Time 2), and a 30-minute phone interview (Time 3),
conducted at six-month intervals. The focus was on projects related to
family, work, and health that participants were working on during the
period of the study. Each successive interview investigated
participants' assessments of their progress in the present,
recollection of six months in the past, and prediction six months into
the future. At Time 1, participants generated a list of two important
family, work, and health tasks, then chose one of each as the most
important in that domain. For each of the most important tasks,
questions were asked about deadlines, whether participants were doing
tasks because they had to do them, felt that they should do them, or
chose to do them, and whether participants were doing tasks for
themselves, others, or both. All six projects were ranked according to
importance, and participants divided all their time into percentages
spent on family, work, and health. The majority of questions on the
mail questionnaire at Time 1 were taken from the Midlife Development
Inventory (MIDI), the instrument created for the national
study. Respondents were asked to rate their control over health, to
make assessments about present, past, and future health, to list any
serious illnesses, and to indicate their physical health status. Study
participants also rated their mental health, and discussed stressful
life events in the last six months for self, spouse/significant other,
parents, and children. Other questions focused on depression, mastery
and constraints, community involvement, family, work, and life
satisfaction. Scales used included the Ryff Well-Being Scales, the
Eysenck Personality Inventory, the Staudinger and Baltes Wisdom Scale
(1995), and the Ways of Coping Scale. Time 2 was done in-person, and
included a 50-minute series of cognitive tests followed by a 40-minute
interview. The cognitive testing consisted of nine measures of
cognitive ability completed in the following order: WAIS Forward Digit
Span, WAIS Backward Digit Span, WAIS Vocabulary, counting backwards
test, letter comparison test, dual-task test involving the counting
backwards and letter comparison tests, WAIS Digit Symbol,
Schaie-Thurston Letter Series, and Raven's Advanced Progressive
Matrices. The Time 2 interview began with a series of questions asking
about each of the family, work, and health tasks elicited from the
participants in Time 1. Many questions were repeated from the MIDI
including rating physical health, family life, work situation, and
life overall, rating physical and mental health from poor to
excellent, and a measure of stressful life events in the last six
months for self, spouse/significant other, parents, and
children. Participants were asked to rate how old they felt and how
old they looked and to indicate their total yearly household
income. Lastly, a series of open-ended questions asked about best and
worst aspects of family, work, and health, how participants managed
their daily life, the most challenging aspect of life and how it was
managed, and what participants found most helpful in carrying out
their daily life. Photographs were taken of participants at the
conclusion of the interview. Time 3 asked again about each of the most
important family, work, and health tasks elicited from the
participants in Time 1. Newly developed questions asked participants
about ideas related to middle age, including when the participant
believed middle age begins and ends, whether the participant was
younger than, in, or older than middle age, the biggest changes in
middle age, the best and worst aspects of middle age, whether the
participant knew anyone who had had a "midlife crisis," and whether he
or she would have or had had a midlife crisis. Participants were asked
to rate how often they had problems and how often things went well
with respect to a list of 26 domains, and how much stress and how much
control they had in these domains. Lastly, participants were asked
whether they had ever returned to a degree-oriented educational
program after being out of school for five or more years, whether they
were presently taking classes to further their education, and whether
being a participant in the study had influenced the ways they thought
about their family, work, and health projects.

Access Notes

Dataset(s)

Study Description

Citation

Lachman, Margie E. Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS): Boston Study of Management Processes, 1995-1997 . ICPSR03596-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2004. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR03596.v1

Universe:
Adult noninstitutionalized population of the Boston area
living in households.

Data Types:
survey data, and clinical data

Data Collection Notes:

MIDUS is the main research activity of the John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Network on Successful Midlife
Development (MIDMAC). Additional information on MIDMAC research
projects is provided on the MIDMAC Web site at
http://www.midmac.med.harvard.edu.